Ecolinguistics

Language, Ecology and the Stories We Live By

Arran Stibbe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317511892
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The increasingly rapid destruction of the ecological systems that support life is calling into question some of the fundamental stories that we live by: stories of unlimited economic growth, of consumerism, progress, individualism, success, and the human domination of nature.

Ecolinguistics shows how linguistic analysis can help reveal the stories we live by, open them up to question, and contribute to the search for new stories. Bringing together the latest ecolinguistic studies with new theoretical insights and practical analyses, this book charts a new course for ecolinguistics as an engaged form of critical enquiry. Featuring:

• A framework for understanding the theory of ecolinguistics and applying it practically in real life;

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• Exploration of diverse topics from consumerism in lifestyle magazines to Japanese nature haiku;

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• A comprehensive glossary giving concise descriptions of the linguistic terms used in the book;

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• Discourse analysis of a wide range of texts including newspapers, magazines, advertisements, films, nonfiction books, and visual images.

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This is essential reading for undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers working in the areas of Discourse Analysis and Language and Ecology.

1

Introduction

Stories are the secret reservoir of values: change the stories that individuals or nations live by and you change the individuals and nations themselves.

(Ben Okri 1996: 21)

Stories bear tremendous creative power. Through them we coordinate human activity, focus attention and intention, define roles, identify what is important and even what is real.

(Charles Eisenstein 2011: 2)

When first encountered, ecolinguistics is sometimes met with bafflement. It is about ecology, and it is about language, but these two initially appear to be entirely separate areas of life. A cursory explanation is that language influences how we think about the world. The language of advertising can encourage us to desire unnecessary and environmentally damaging products, while nature writing can inspire respect for the natural world. How we think has an influence on how we act, so language can inspire us to destroy or protect the ecosystems that life depends on. Ecolinguistics, then, is about critiquing forms of language that contribute to ecological destruction, and aiding in the search for new forms of language that inspire people to protect the natural world. This is a superficial explanation but at least starts to create connections in people’s minds between two areas of life – language and ecology – that are not so separate after all.

Ecolinguistics is very much more than this though. First, there are a number of different approaches with very different aims, goals and methodologies. Second, the analysis goes far deeper than commenting on individual texts such as advertisements or nature books. Ecolinguistics can explore the more general patterns of language that influence how people both think about, and treat, the world. It can investigate the stories we live by – mental models that influence behaviour and lie at the heart of the ecological challenges we are facing. There are certain key stories about economic growth, about technological progress, about nature as an object to be used or conquered, about profit and success, that have profound implications for how we treat the systems that life depends on. As Thomas Berry (1988: 123) puts it:

We are in trouble just now because we don’t have a good story. We are between stories. The old story, the account of how the world came to be and how we fit into it, is no longer effective. Yet we have not learned the new story.

We have still not learned a new story, even though the conditions of the world make it even more important to do so than at the time Berry wrote this.

The link between ecology and language is that how humans treat each other and the natural world is influenced by our thoughts, concepts, ideas, ideologies and worldviews, and these in turn are shaped through language. It is through language that economic systems are built, and when those systems are seen to lead to immense suffering and ecological destruction, it is through language that they are resisted and new forms of economy brought into being. It is through language that consumerist identities are built and lives orientated towards accumulation, and it is through language that consumerism is resisted and people are inspired to ‘be more rather than have more’. It is through language that the natural world is mentally reduced to objects or resources to be conquered, and it is through language that people can be encouraged to respect and care for the systems that support life. In critiquing the damaging social and ecological effects of financial structures, Berardi (2012: 157) states that:

Only an act of language can give us the ability to see and to create a new human condition, where we now only see barbarianism and violence. Only an act of language escaping the technical automatisms of financial capitalism will make possible the emergence of a new life form.

Linguistics provides tools for analysing the texts that surround us in everyday life and shape the kind of society we belong to. These tools can help reveal the hidden stories that exist between the lines of the texts. Once revealed, the stories can be questioned from an ecological perspective: do they encourage people to destroy or protect the ecosystems that life depends on? If they are destructive then they need to be resisted, and if beneficial they need to be promoted.

The role of this book is to bring together a range of theories from linguistics and cognitive science into a linguistic framework to reveal the stories we live by; to develop an ecological framework for judging those stories against; and to put the linguistic and ecological frameworks into action in analysing a wide range of texts from different areas of life.

This book is based on one key premise: that ecolinguistics can play a valuable role in exposing and questioning the stories we live by, and contribute to the search for new ones. This is only possible if a large number of people, from a wide variety of backgrounds, undertake ecolinguistic inquiry, from major academic research projects to personal exploration. This book, then, is for linguists, geographers, biologists and academic researchers from diverse subject areas. It is for students at all levels, educators, sustainability officers in companies, those working in environmental organisations, and those involved in a more personal inquiry into their own place and role within an unsustainable society. It is for everyone who is engaged in an inquiry into the industrial society around them, everyone who is questioning why that society is unsustainable and how it can be changed.

The stories we live by

As evidence of the scale of the ecological issues we are facing in the twenty-first century emerges, and the scale of the response required becomes clearer, there are increasing calls to go beyond attempts to address isolated symptoms with technical solutions and instead consider the deeper social and cultural causes of the problems we face. Growing inequality, climate change, biodiversity loss, alienation from nature and loss of community are bringing into question the fundamental stories that industrial societies are based on.

David Korten (2006: 248) describes four stories at the heart of western imperial civilisation which he claims have profound ecological implications. There is the ‘prosperity story’ which promotes worship of material acquisition and money, the ‘biblical story’ which focuses on the afterlife rather than the world around us, the ‘security story’ which builds up the military and police to protect relationships of domination, and the ‘secular meaning story’ which reduces life to matter and mechanism. These stories, he maintains, perpetuate injustice and lead to both alienation from life and environmental destruction. Chet Bowers (2014: 27) describes how the root metaphors of ‘individualism, progress, economism, and anthropocentrism have merged into a powerful process of conceptual and moral legitimation’. Stories such as these, he claims, carry forward ‘the deep assumptions of an ecologically unsustainable culture’. For Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine (2009) the most dangerous story that we live by is ‘the story of human centrality, of a species destined to be lord of all it surveys, unconfined by the limits that apply to other, lesser creatures’.

These are not, however, stories in the usual sense of narratives. They are not told in novels, read to children at bedtime, shared around a fire, or conveyed through anecdotes in formal speeches. Instead they exist behind and between the lines of the texts that surround us – the news reports that describe the ‘bad news’ about a drop in Christmas sales, or the ‘good news’ that airline profits are up, or the advertisements promising us that we will be better people if we purchase the unnecessary goods they are promoting. Underneath common ways of writing and speaking in industrial societies are stories about unlimited economic growth as being not just possible but the goal of society, of the accumulation of unnecessary goods as a path towards self-improvement, of progress and success defined narrowly in terms of technological innovation and profit, and of nature as something separate from humans, a mere stock of resources to be exploited.

To give an example of how a story can be told ‘between-the-lines’, consider the 2013 BBC documentary ‘What makes us human?’, summarised on the BBC website as:

• Professor Alice Roberts investigates exactly what makes us different from the animal kingdom. What is it that truly makes us human? (ML12 – see Appendix for reference).

Behind this phrasing are two stories. The first is that humans live outside the animal kingdom, i.e. that humans are not animals. The second is that what makes us human is to be discovered in our differences from other animals rather than our commonalities. In the documentary, Professor Roberts herself does not use the first story, but she does use the second:

• What is it about our bodies, our genes and our brains that sets us apart? What is it that truly makes us human?

• Michael has devised an experiment that he believes reveals a specific piece of behaviour that separates us from chimps, that defines us as a species, and truly makes us human (ML13 – transcribed extracts from ‘What makes us human?’).

Neither of these extracts directly states that ‘it is in our differences from other animals that we can discover what makes us human’; instead it is just assumed as the background story necessary to semantically link the two questions in the first extract, and the three coordinated statements in the second. The story is a pervasive one, told between the lines by many people, in many contexts. Noam Chomsky (2006: 88), for instance, wrote:

When we study human language, we are approaching what some might call the ‘human essence’, the distinctive qualities of mind that are, so far as we know, unique to man.

This uses apposition (the equating of two concepts by placing them immediately after each other) to represent the essence of being human as identical to human uniqueness. The definite article the in the ‘human essence’ leaves no space for qualities we share with other animals to also be considered part of our essence.

The idea that our humanity lies in our uniqueness from other animals is just a story, however, and other stories are possible. The danger in focusing on difference is that the story can obscure some of the important things that humans and other animals have in common: having emotions, being embodied, bonding socially with others, and most importantly, being dependent on other species and the environment for our continued survival. Plumwood (2007) strongly criticises this story:

Arguably, the distinguishing feature of western culture, and perhaps also the chief mark of its ecological failure, is the idea that humankind is radically different and apart from the rest of nature and from other animals. This idea, sometimes called Human Exceptionalism, has allowed us to exploit nature and people more ruthlessly (some would say more efficiently) than other cultures, and our high-powered, destructive forms of life dominate the planet.

In seeking solutions to the ecological challenges we face, we may have to explore and reconsider some of the fundamental stories that underlie our culture, including stories about who we are as humans.

The focus in this book on stories we live by is a way of bringing together a diversity of approaches to ecolinguistic analysis into a single framework. When ecolinguists examine ideologies, metaphors, frames and a variety of other cognitive and linguistic phenomena, what they are doing is revealing and uncovering the stories that shape people’s lives and shape the society in which we live.

In its traditional sense, the word ‘story’ refers to a narrative which has a clear beginning, middle and end, and takes place over time. When engaging with a story in this traditional sense, readers can recognise it as a story by its structure and context, and hence treat it as just one possible perspective or interpretation of the world around us.

The stories we live by are different, however. We are exposed to them without consciously selecting them or necessarily being aware that they are just stories. They appear between the lines of the texts which surround us in everyday life: in news reports, advertisements, conversations with friends, the weather forecast, instruction manuals or textbooks. They appear in educational, political, professional, medical, legal and other institutional contexts without announcing themselves as stories.

In commenting on the ‘story of human centrality’, Kingsnorth and Hine (2009) state that ‘What makes this story so dangerous is that, for the most part, we have forgotten that it is a story’. Similarly, David Loy (2010: 5) describes how ‘unaware that our stories are stories, we experience them as the world’. Macy and Johnstone (2012: 15) describe the ‘business-as-usual’ story that sees economic growth and technological development as the way forward for society, and comment that ‘When you’re living in the middle of this story, it’s easy to think of it as just the way things are’. The stories we live by are embedded deeply in the minds of individuals across a society and appear only indirectly between the lines of the texts that circulate in that society. They are therefore not immediately recognisable as stories, and need to be exposed, subjected to critical analysis, and resisted if they are implicated in injustice and environmental destruction.

Midgley (2011: 1) calls stories in this sense the ‘myths we live by’. By myths she means ‘imaginative patterns, networks of powerful symbols that suggest particular ways of interpreting the world’. Indeed, Kingsnorth and Hine (2009) use the terms myth and story interchangeably: ‘We intend to challenge the stories which underpin our civilisation: the myth of progress, the myth of human centrality, and the myth of our separation from “nature”.’ Robertson (2014: 54) uses the term ‘paradigm’ in a similar sense to refer to ‘a fundamental framework for understanding the world, a coherent set of assumptions and concepts that defines a way of viewing reality’. Of particular concern for Robertson is the paradigm of ‘economic growth’. She describes how ‘Growth as the core economic paradigm has been developing for several hundred years and has become solidly entrenched since the last century’. Berardi (2012: 131) emphasises the rhythmic nature of patterns using the term refrain, to mean the repetitions of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Ideologies and discourse
• 3. Frames and framing
• 4. Metaphors
• 5. Evaluations and appraisal patterns
• 6. Identities
• 7. Convictions and facticity patterns
• 8. Erasure
• 9. Salience and re-minding
• 10. Conclusion
• Appendix: Sources of data
• Glossary
• Index